Another first for Flipkart: Android Wear Supported Mobile Shopping App

Bansal and company, knowing fully well, that being the early bird in this industry always pays, have come up with another first for Flipkart.

The leading e commerce retailer in India, the ten year old Flipkart, has now become the first online shopping site in India to launch an Android Wear app, as a part of its efforts to make online shopping more popular and easy. The app will be compatible with all Android based smartwatches running on Android and sold exclusively on Flipkart. This will include smartwatches by Motorola, Martian and Garmin.

This app will support viewing Flipkart wish lists on the wearable gear. The users can also choose to view push notifications from Flipkart on their gear.

Though the app is not available on the Play Store right now, installing it should be easy. All you need to do to install it is download the latest version of Flipkart app for your smartphone and then connect it to your Android wear device. Once that has been done, you will be able to see your wish list on your wearable automatically! You will also get personalized notifications from Flipkart coming directly to your wearable device (who support Android Wear)

Here are some of the features available on the Flipkart Android wear app at the moment include:

New User Interface and faster app

Smarter Search: Look up products, categories or brands using text, voice or by barcode

The launch of this smart app for smartwatches from Flipkart comes at a time when lots of them are being launched and are gaining popularity, particularly among gadget freaks and techies. Three new ones, namely Samsung Galaxy Gear S, Moto 360 and the Apple Watch, have been launched during the last two months.

Sensing that smartwatches could be the next big thing after smartphones and tablets, Flipkart has come up with this unique app, trying to cash in on the smartwatch fad.

Now while the app does sound like a lot of fun, we are not impressed.

1. The app does not offer complete shopping. All it allows users is to see their wish list.

2. Even if they did enable the app to allow users to shop over Flipkart, how much fun would shopping be on such a tiny screen? Wouldn’t they rather enjoy shopping over a larger screen atop their smartphones instead?

3. Android wear is yet to take off completely. Though lots of manufacturers are coming up with wearable devices for the users, they have a limited appeal.

Flipkart handles nearly half of India’s online retail sales at present. Will an app like this at a time when more and more players jumping into the Android wearables market mean more business for it at the end of the day?

Will Flipkart get the early bird advantage here? Or will the app simply fizzle out (Read that: wastage of resources for Flipkart) later?